Great companies...

Are either small or dictatorships.

They are therefore, by definition, temporary affairs....

Apple's share price will halve in the next 2 years.

I've been obsessed with Sherlock Holmes for years....

(although its probably not something one should admit) - I love the Guy Richie films....

One of my favourite Sherlock quotes "It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize out of a number of facts which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated." There is much the world of brand and technology can learn from a data driven approach combined with a healthy dose of humanity,  intuition and joie de vie... 

Interesting post - a "moral" lens on social business

Thriving in the Collaborative Economy from Nick Jankel & wecreate on Vimeo.

As part of a larger group, Nick and I went to African together in the early 1990s. Probably fair to say we were all, profoundly changed by the experience - and I'm not sure some of the learning from that year isn't in this talk...

A very erudite, succinct and persuasive "take" on social business...

Do we really need our friends to help us discover things?

So much social network activity appears to be a desperate curation towards a more palatable version of an existence. Is Facebook's proposition of discovering things through your friends really so convincing?

Don't we have a biological need to go beyond our own borders?

We don't buy airbrushed existences offline - not sure we ever will on.

Nando's enters the social media hall of fame...

If Facebook is the internet - then count me out

What dreadful, stale silos most mass social networks have become. A fad of the early 21st century?

What marketing could learn from baseball

I've written and posted about Moneyball quite a bit over the years - this is the text from something we've recently done for M&C's blog.

The forthcoming release of Moneyball – the screen adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book bearing the same name – is significant, not just for fans of Brad Pitt and baseball, but for marketing and communications professionals too.

Moneyball tells the story of the coach of the perennial under performing Oakland Athletic baseball team, Billy Beane, who transformed Baseball by using Wall Street style statistical modelling to buy better players for less money.

In a world where the aesthetic quality of a player (and his girlfriend) were deemed the best indicators of prowess on the field, Billy Beane understood that objectively analysing the data about a  players’ performance  (and not worrying too much about whether he was packing a few extra pounds) was a far more reliable guide to finding players who won matches. His winning streak was the ultimate demonstration of ROI.

The marketing industry, like baseball before Billy Beane, still uses aesthetic quality as its yardstick of success, and yet we have access to far more data than Billy Beane could have ever dreamed of. Data  with which the industry could – and will eventually - transform itself.

Change is in the air. IBM’s CMO survey, also out this week, shows 63% of CMOs believe demonstrating ROI from their marketing activity will be the most important measure of their personal success by 2015.

Latest figures from a leading Search and Selection firm servicing the marketing industry report an unprecedented rise in demand for roles with the words, "Data" and "Analyst" in them. Evidently some like Billy Beane, have already started to import data mining and statistical analysis techniques into their way of working

“Correlations coefficient” “Monte Carlo output”, “statistical noise” - strange words from a world many have yet to discover – but which for a growing number of us over the next 5 years will enter our lexicon and revolutionise the way we conduct and measure marketing activity.

In the meantime, here’s the Moneyball trailer. See you in the queue.

(orginal text by Christian - with my edits)